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Comment by arielm | Hacker News Reader

I think you guys are missing the point of this Twitter thread.

Yes, the kindle itself is mediocre at best. Technically it’s got lot of issues, and I personally still prefer a physical book over it any day. But...

The thread was about being inspired. You can be inspired even while working on something that ultimately isn’t great. You can be inspired working with someone who has the reputation of not being the best boss. You can be inspired when you want to.

So while working on this mediocre device, which is pretty much the only way to consume books digitally, this guy loved every minute.

To me, that’s the lesson here.

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Do people here really think the Kindle is a mediocre product? This feels to me like another case of HN's 'no one will ever need Dropbox, you can just hook up the open-source libraries'.

Very much it, I can't say that anybody doing hardware for the first time would be anywhere close on "completeness" to what Amazon managed to pull out (probably with tons of advisers, and external experts, but still...)

I worked, work, and probably will keep working with tons of clients from Kickstarter/Indygogo space, and prime majority of them simply wrap up somewhere 6-9 months into the project because the "don't see the end to the tunnel," or realise that they picked a very wrong industry for easy money.

P.S. I believe I might have once encountered some of people who worked on kindle 1, and it was far from pleasant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18970281

I viewed it as a story in how a great CEO realized that he needed to personally step in to drive and protect a program that could cannibalize their existing business. Similar story to Netflix’s video streaming over the CDs.

And I think the critical implementation of that was "firing" Steve Kessel. Don't have him worry about his old P&L at the same time.

Yes. Same as Hastings kicking all the CD folks off his executive team. The CEO of a startup I worked at limited the head of his most proilfitable business unit to 15 minutes per month. It seemed insane to put the cash cow at risk. He was right though. He couldn’t grow the future without doing that.

You throw a lot of unsubstantiated shade in the guise of "getting" the real message.

> Yes, the kindle itself is mediocre at best.

Which eReader is better than the Kindle in the same price range?

> Technically it’s got lot of issues

Like what? I also prefer real book, though when I've used the Kindle, I've had 0 problems. The delivery over cellular works, it has very good battery life, is light and the display does what it's suppose to do.

> You can be inspired working with someone who has the reputation of not being the best boss

Haven't heard Jeff Bezos isn't a good boss. The Twitter thread has little negative things about Jeff as a boss / executive, the contrary actually.

> Which eReader is better than the Kindle in the same price range?

Kobo. But how is this relevant here?

the main point that most people miss is that you can deliver something mediocre and still beat the competition. your product doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be better than the competion.

I really doubt this guy thinks the first Kindle was mediocre for the time.

Yes, inspiration, that's how these so called technology leaders trick us engineers in doing work for them, even, at times, to the detriment of society.

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